Guess Which Music Video Broke YouTube?

I didn’t think this was actually possible, people watching a music video so many times that counter breaks. And what music video are we talking about? Psy’s Gangnam Style.

It seems that PSY’s music video surpassed the mind-bending maximum view-count number the folks at YouTube assumed they would never see: 2,147,483,647—more now.

Why is 2,147,483,647 so significant? We’re about to get a little computer geeky.

Well, in computer terms, that’s the highest value you can write with 32 bits (i.e. a string of 32 zeroes and ones has 2,147,483,648 combinations, but since one of those is zero, you can only count up to 2,147,483,647). Since that’s like two India’s worth of views, YouTube didn’t think anyone would make anything worth watching that many times. But the South Korean pop revolution that was Psy, doing his horsey dance and screaming at women’s butts apparently is quite a sight to see, numerous times, all around the world.

So how does YouTube plan to fix this problem? For the time being, they stopped using decimals, which adds 3 digits to the number of possible integers, or a thousand-fold increase in how high it can count. I hate to think of how catchy the first video to get two trillion hits will be.

Here’s the YouTube breaking video, Gangnam Style, if you care to wrack up more views and watch it for the umpteenth time.